meteor also called shooting star, or falling star, streak of light in the sky that results when a particle or small chunk of stony or metallic matter enters the Earth’s atmosphere and vaporizes. The term is sometimes applied to the falling object itself, but the latter is properly called a meteoroid. The vast majority of meteoroids burn up in the upper atmosphere, but occasionally one of relatively large mass survives its fiery plunge and reaches the surface as a solid body. Such an object is known as a meteorite.Characteristic observational effectsOn any clear night in the countryside and meteoroidrespectively, a glowing streak in the sky (meteor) and its cause, which is a relatively small stony or metallic natural object from space (meteoroid) that enters Earth’s atmosphere and heats to incandescence. In modern usage the term meteoroid, rather than being restricted to objects entering Earth’s atmosphere, is applied to any small object in orbit around the Sun having the same nature as those that result in meteors.

When a meteoroid enters Earth’s atmosphere, it is traveling at very high velocity—more than 11 km per second (25,000 miles per hour) at minimum, which is many times faster than a bullet leaving a gun barrel. Frictional heating, produced by the meteoroid’s energetic collision with atmospheric atoms and molecules, causes its surface to melt and vaporize and also heats the air around it. The result is the luminous phenomenon recognized as a meteor. Popular synonyms for meteors include shooting stars and falling stars. The vast majority of meteoroids that collide with Earth burn up in the upper atmosphere. If a meteoroid survives its fiery plunge through the atmosphere and lands on Earth’s surface, the object is known as a meteorite.

The term meteoroid is usually reserved for chunks of matter that are approximately house-sized—i.e., some tens of metres across—and smaller. Meteoroids are believed to be mostly fragments of asteroids and comets and are placed, with them, in the category of solar system objects known as small bodies. A few meteoroids also appear to have come from the Moon and Mars. The smallest meteoroids, those less than a few hundred micrometres across (about the size of a period on a printed page), are called interplanetary dust particles or micrometeoroids.

The terms meteoroid and meteor (and meteorite as well) are sometimes confusingly interchanged in common usage. Meteor in particular is often applied to a meteoroid hurtling through space, to an incandescent meteoroid (rather than just its luminous streak) in the atmosphere, or to an object that has hit the ground or a man-made object. An example of the last case is found in the name Meteor Crater, a well-known impact structure in Arizona, U.S.

Basic features of meteors

On any clear night beyond the bright lights of cities, one can observe see with the naked eye several meteors (or shooting stars) per hour as they streak through the sky, with durations ranging from per hour. Meteors can last for a small fraction of a second up to several seconds. Quite oftenthey vary in brightness along the path of their flight, appear to emit “sparks” , as the glowing meteoroid streaks through the sky, it varies in brightness, appears to emit sparks or flares, and sometimes leave leaves a luminous train that lingers after their its flight has ended. These Unusually luminous meteors are termed fireballs or bolides (the latter term is often applied to those meteoroids observed to explode in the sky). When meteor rates increase significantly above normal, the phenomenon is called a meteor shower (see below). Meteors that do not appear to belong to showers are called sporadic.

Meteors are the result of the high-velocity collision of meteoroids with the Earth’s atmosphere. Nearly all such interplanetary bodies are small fragments derived from comets or asteroids.The observed apparent brightness of these easily observable meteors covers the same range of brightness as the stars visible to the unaided eye (i.e., from about zero to fifth astronomical magnitude). They constitute a portion of an Earth-impacting interplanetary flux of similar bodies ranging in mass from less than one nanogram up to millions of tons. The smaller bodies A typical visible meteor is produced by an object the size of a grain of sand and may start at altitudes of 100 km (60 miles) or higher. Meteoroids smaller than about 500 micrometres (μm; 0.02 inch) across are too faint to be seen with the naked eye but are observable with the aid of binoculars and telescopesor ; they can also be detected by radarreflection. Brighter meteors—of magnitudes ranging meteors—ranging in brightness brilliance from that of Venus (−4 magnitude) to greater than that of the full Moon—are moon—are less common but are not really unusual. These ; these are produced by meteoroids with masses ranging from several grams up to about one ton .

The brightest meteor (possibly of cometary origin) for which historical documentation exists struck on June 30, 1908, in the Tunguska region of central Siberia and rivaled the Sun in brightness. The energy delivered to the atmosphere by this impact was roughly equivalent to that of a 10-megaton thermonuclear explosion and caused the destruction of forest over an area of about 2,000 square kilometres. The geologic record of cratering attests to the impact of much more massive meteoroids, including objects with kinetic energies equivalent to 100 million megatons. Fortunately, impacts of this magnitude occur only once or twice every 100 million years. It is hypothesized that large impacts of this kind may have played a major role in determining the course of biological evolution by causing simultaneous mass extinctions of many species of organisms, possibly including the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. If so, the replacement of reptiles by mammals as the dominant land animals, the eventual consequence of which was the rise of the human species, would be the result of a grand example of a phenomenon observable every clear night.

The visibility of meteors is a consequence of the high velocity of meteoroids in interplanetary space. Before entering the region of the Earth’s gravitational influence, their velocities (centimetre- to metre-sized objects, respectively).

As meteoroids are traveling in interplanetary space near Earth, their velocities relative to Earth’s range from a few kilometres per second up to as high as 72 kilometres km per second. As they approach draw closer to the Earth, within a few Earth radii, planet, they are accelerated to even yet higher velocities by the planet’s Earth’s gravitational field. As a consequence, the The minimum velocity with which a meteoroid can enter the atmosphere is equal to the Earth’s escape velocity of 11kilometres .2 km per second. Even at this minimum velocity, the kinetic energy of for a meteoroid would be 6 × 104 joules per gram of its mass. This can be compared with the energy of about 4 × 103 joules per gram produced by chemical explosives, of a given mass is about 15 times that produced by an equal mass of chemical explosives such as TNT. As the meteoroid is slowed down by friction with atmospheric gas molecules, this kinetic energy is converted into heat. Even at the very low atmospheric density present at altitudes of 100 kilometres (6 × 10−10 gram per cubic centimetre compared with 10−3 gram per cubic centimetre at sea level)an altitude of 100 km, this heat is sufficient to vaporize and ionize the surface material of the meteoroid and also to dissociate and ionize the surrounding atmospheric gasas well. Electronic transitions effected by this . The excitation of atmospheric and meteoroidal atoms produce produces a luminous region, which travels with the meteoroid and greatly exceeds its dimensions. About 0.1–1 percent of the original kinetic energy of the meteoroid is transformed into visible light, with most of the remainder going to heat up the air and the meteoroid and pushing aside the air that the meteoroid encounters.

At deeper levels in the atmosphere, a shock wave may be produced develop in the air ahead of the meteoroid. This The shock wave interacts with the solid meteoroid and its vapour in a complex way. About 0.1 to 1 percent of the original kinetic energy of the meteoroid is transformed into visible light., and it can travel all the way to the ground even when the meteoroid does not. The penetration of a meteoroid in the kilogram range to altitudes of about 40 km can produce sounds on the ground similar to sonic booms or thunder. The sounds can even be intense enough to shake the ground and be recorded by seismometers designed to monitor earthquakes.

This great release of energy quickly destroys most meteoroidsof small mass—particularly , particularly those with relatively high velocities—very quicklyvelocities. This destruction is the result both of ablation (the loss of mass from the surface of the meteoroid by vaporization or as molten droplets) and of fragmentation caused by aerodynamic pressure that exceeds the crushing strength of the meteoroid. For these reasons, numerous meteors end their observed flight at altitudes above 80 kilometreskm, and penetration to altitudes as low as 50 kilometres km is unusual.Nevertheless, some meteoroids survive to much lower altitudes owing to a combination of

The fragmentation of larger meteoroids due to the stresses of atmospheric entry is often catastrophic. About 10 large explosions (each equivalent to at least 1 kiloton of TNT, but some much larger) occur in the atmosphere every year. Explosions of this size are typically produced by meteoroids that are initially at least 2 metres (6 feet) across. For comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 had an explosive yield of 15 kilotons of TNT. A particularly spectacular explosion occurred over the Tunguska region of Siberia in Russia on June 30, 1908 (see Tunguska event). The shock wave from that explosion, estimated to be equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT, flattened trees over an area almost 50 km across (about 2,000 square km [500,000 acres]). Witnesses reported that its brightness rivaled that of the Sun.

Despite the fiery end in store for most meteoroids, some lose their kinetic energy before they are completely destroyed. This can occur if the meteoroid is small and has a relatively low entry velocity (XXltXX less than 25 kilometres km per second) , large mass (XXgtXX100 grams), or enters the atmosphere at a relatively shallow angle. It also can occur if the meteoroid has a large initial mass (greater than 100 grams [0.2 pound]) and fairly high crushing strength(XXgtXX107 dynes per square centimetre). Those that are recoverable as meteorites lose their kinetic energy before the meteoroid is completely destroyed. They . Very small meteoroids—interplanetary dust particles less than 50–100 μm—are effectively stopped at considerable heights and may take weeks or months to settle out of the atmosphere. Because comet-derived particles tend to enter the atmosphere at high velocities, only those in the above-mentioned size range survive. Meteoroids as large as a few millimetres across that do survive melt either partially or completely and then resolidify.

Somewhat larger meteoroids—those as large as some tens of metres across—that reach the ground as meteorites melt at their surfaces while their interiors remain unheated. Even objects this large are effectively stopped by the atmosphere at altitudes of 5 to 25 kilometres5–25 km, although they generally separate into fragments. Following this atmospheric braking, they begin to cool, their luminosity fades, and they fall to the Earth at low terminal velocities of 100 to 200 velocities—100–200 metres per second (225–450 miles per hour). This “dark flight” of the meteoroid may be last several minutesin duration, in contrast to the few seconds of visible flight .

The passage of meteoroids through the atmosphere produces atmospheric shock waves that penetrate to the ground. The penetration of a meteoroid in the kilogram range to altitudes of about 40 kilometres can thereby produce sounds on the ground similar to sonic booms or thunder. These sound waves can be intense enough to become coupled to the ground and recorded by seismometers.

The effect of the final impact with the ground of meteorites in the kilogram mass range could be considered an anticlimax. The fall can go unnoticed by those near the impact site, the impact being signaled only by a whistling sound and a thud. For this reason, many meteorites are recovered only because at least one fragment of the meteoroid strikes a house, drawing the attention of the residents to an unusual event.

Orbits of meteoroids and meteor showers

Prior to entering the gravitational field of the Earth, a meteoroidal body, like all bodies of the solar system, moves around the Sun in an elliptic Keplerian orbit. If this orbit can be determined, valuable information relevant to identifying the source—the parent body—of the meteoroid can be obtained.

When the coordinates in the sky of the trajectory of a meteor are observed from two or more well-separated stations, the direction in which the meteoroid was moving in space before it encountered the Earth can be estimated reasonably well by triangulation. This direction is called the radiant of the meteor. If the motion of the meteoroid is thought of as a velocity vector, such observations determine approximately the direction of this vector. To determine the meteoroid’s orbit, however, requires ascertaining not only the direction but also the magnitude of the velocity vector. Although well-trained visual observers are able to estimate the coordinates of the meteor trajectories and thereby determine radiants fairly well, their velocity estimates have proved to be too uncertain to be useful for orbit determination.

This problem was overcome during the 1940s by the introduction of astronomical cameras specially designed for studying meteors. These wide-field cameras were equipped with a rotating shutter that periodically interrupted the light to the photographic plate. The shutter breaks permitted calculation of the speed of a meteor along its path. The position of the meteor’s trajectory with respect to the stars photographed on the same plate also was measured accurately. Such observations made at two or more stations could then be used to calculate precisely the orbit of the meteoroid before it encountered the Earth. During the 1940s, special radar instruments also were applied to the study of meteors generally fainter than those observed photographically.

“Showers” of meteors have been known as a meteor. By the time a meteoroid hits the ground, it has lost so much heat that the meteorite can be touched immediately with the bare hand. Often the only obvious sign on a meteorite of its fiery passage through the atmosphere is a dark, glassy crust, called a fusion crust, which is produced by melting of its surface. Sometimes meteorites also end up with aerodynamic shapes and flow structures on their surfaces. These features indicate that the meteoroid remained in the same orientation during atmospheric entry, much like manned spacecraft, rather than having tumbled as most meteoroids seem to do.

Meteor showers

Showers of meteors, in which the rate of meteor sightings temporarily increases at approximately the same time each year, have been recorded since ancient times. On rare occasions, these such showers are very dramatic, with thousands of meteors meteoroids falling per hour. More often, the background usual hourly rate of roughly 5 observed meteors increases up to about 10–50.Shower meteors characteristically have nearly the same radiant. This means they

Meteors in showers characteristically are all moving in the same direction in space. As a consequence, plots of observed meteoroid trajectories on a star map of the sky converge at a single point, the radiant of the shower, for the same reason that parallel railroad tracks appear to converge at a distance. The new photographic data fully confirmed the belief A shower is usually named for the constellation (or for a star in the constellation) that contains its radiant. The introduction of photography to meteorite studies confirmed the theory developed from naked-eye observations that meteors belonging to a particular shower had have not only the same radiant but similar orbits as well. In other words, the meteoroids producing the responsible for meteor showers move in confined streams (called meteor streams) around the Sun. The introduction of radar observation led to the discovery of several new meteor streams that were totally showers—and thus of new meteor streams—that were invisible to the eye and to cameras because they came from radiants in the daytime sky. A fact of All told, about 2,000 showers have been identified.

Of great importance, and also fully confirmed by the photographic data, is the association of many several meteor streams showers with the orbits of observed active comets. A list of the more important meteor-stream orbits showers and associated comets is given in the Table. The streams with cometary associations represent debris ejected from a comet along its orbit through space. A recently formed stream, the Leonids, tends to appear in great table. As a comet travels near the Sun, it is heated and its abundant volatile ices (frozen gases) vaporize, releasing less volatile material in the form of dust and larger grains up to perhaps 1 cm (0.4 inch) across. The shower associated with a given comet thus represents debris shed from that comet along its orbit, which the orbit of Earth intersects annually. When Earth passes through this stream of debris, a meteor shower is produced.

The Leonid meteor shower represents a recently formed meteor stream. This shower, though it occurs every year, tends to increase greatly in visual strength every 33 or 34 years, which is the same as the orbital period of the parent comet, TempleTempel-Tuttle. These Such behaviour results from the fact that these meteoroids are mostly still clustered in a compact swarm moving in the orbit of the comet. With Over the passage of next 1,000 years or so, the slightly different orbits of the meteoroids will cause disperse them to disperse more uniformly along the orbit of the comet. In such cases, a shower, usually weaker, occurs annually when the Earth’s orbit intersects the orbital plane of the meteor stream. After Meteor streams for which this has occurred produce showers that are usually weaker but often more consistent in strength from one occurrence to the next. Over a still longer period , of about 10,000 years, planetary gravitational perturbations by the planets will cause disperse the orbits of the stream meteoroids to disperse into different orbits, and their identity the extent that their identities as members of a stream will gradually disappear.

Meteors that do not appear to belong to streams are called sporadic. It is likely that in some sense all meteoroids are, or have been, stream members because the physical processes that release meteoroids from either comets or asteroids do so in great numbers. Sporadic meteors are therefore the result of streams too weak to be distinguished from one another or old streams so dispersed as to be no longer recognizable.

There is one rather strange example disappear.

One strange example exists of a major meteor shower that is clearly identifiable associated with an astronomical object that , at least at first glance , does not appear to be resemble a comet: . The parent object of the Geminid shower and 3200 Phaeton, respectively. The latter (formerly designated 1983TB) exhibits none of has all the appearances of a small Earth-crossing asteroid. Discovered in 1983, it does not exhibit the usual cometary features , of a nebulous halo head and tail; it simply looks like a small Earth-crossing asteroid. If the stream is cometary, it means that a comet that produced meteoroids prolifically only a few thousand years ago has now completely ceased its cometary activity and looks more like an asteroid. The orbits of 3200 Phaeton and the Geminids also are unlike those of comets in that their aphelia are at 2.4 AU, well within the orbit of Jupiter. If 3200 Phaeton came from the Oort cloud of comets, it must at one time have crossed the orbit of Jupiter. Over a span of millions of years, it is not out of the question that close encounters with the Earth and Venus could gravitationally perturb a Jupiter-crossing orbit into an orbit of this kind. The observed rate at which matter is lost from comets, however, seems to indicate that their inventory is exhausted in only a few thousand years. Thus, the millions of years required for this orbital evolution does not appear to have been available.

It could be hypothesized that 3200 Phaeton was never a comet at all but simply an Apollo object that strayed from the asteroid belt by the reasonably well-understood resonant perturbations that can cause this to occur. The Geminid meteors would then be explained as fragments produced by an asteroidal collision while 3200 Phaeton is traversing the portion of its orbit that is in the asteroid belt. There are serious problems with this explanation. Quantitative calculations show that an asteroidal collision of the required magnitude during an interval of only a few thousand years is very unlikely. Studies of the historical orbital evolution of the Geminid stream suggest that its orbit is incompatible with a single outburst of meteoroids; it is more like one expected from a body that produced a series of outbursts. Finally, the orbit is not the kind one would expect for an Apollo object perturbed from the asteroid belt. Its perihelion is too close to the Sun. An understanding of the mystery of 3200 Phaeton and the Geminids is likely to contribute much to the understanding of comets, the origin of meteor streams, and the relationship between Apollo objects, comets, and asteroids.

Fireball networks

A very significant development in meteor science occurred during the 1960slong tail and so was placed among the asteroids and named Phaethon. Most researchers believe Phaethon is the burned-out remnant of a once-active comet, but its nature may only be established with observations by spacecraft. For additional information about Phaethon, see asteroid: Asteroids in unusual orbits.

Meteorites—meteoroids that survive atmospheric entry

The effect of the final impact with the ground of meteoroids about a kilogram or less in mass is usually an anticlimax. The fall can go unnoticed even by those near the impact site, the impact being signaled only by a whistling sound and a thud. Many meteorites are recovered only because at least one fragment of the meteoroid strikes a house, car, or other object that draws the attention of local people to an unusual event. Recovered meteorites range in mass from a gram up to nearly 60 tons. Most meteorites consist either of stony—chiefly silicate—material (stony meteorites) or of primarily nickel-iron alloy (iron meteorites). In a small percentage of meteorites, nickel-iron alloy and silicate material are intermixed in approximately equal proportions (stony iron meteorites). For a comprehensive discussion of meteorites, see meteorite.

In addition to these relatively large meteorites, much smaller objects (less than a few millimetres across) can be recovered on Earth. The smallest, which are in the category of interplanetary dust particles and range from 10 to 100 μm in diameter, are generally collected on filters attached to aircraft flying in the stratosphere at altitudes of at least 20 km, where the concentration of terrestrial dust is low. On Earth’s surface, somewhat larger micrometeorites have been collected from locations where other sources of dust are few and weathering rates are slow. These include sediments cored from the deep ocean, melt pools in the Greenland ice cap, and Antarctic ice that has been melted and filtered in large amounts. Researchers also have collected meteoroidal particles outside Earth’s atmosphere with special apparatus on orbiting spacecraft, and in 2006 the Stardust mission returned dust that it had trapped in the vicinity of Comet Wild 2.

When meteoroids are sufficiently large—i.e.,100 metres to several kilometres in diameter—they pass through the atmosphere without slowing down appreciably. As a result, they strike Earth’s surface at velocities of many kilometres per second. The huge amount of kinetic energy released in such a violent collision is sufficient to produce an impact crater. In many ways, impact craters resemble those produced by nuclear explosions. They are often called meteorite craters, even though almost all of the impacting meteoroids themselves are vaporized during the explosion. Arizona’s Meteor Crater, one of the best-preserved terrestrial impact craters, is about 1.2 km across and 200 metres deep. It was formed about 50,000 years ago by an iron meteoroid that is estimated to have been roughly 50–100 metres across, equivalent to a mass of about four million tons. Myriad nickel-iron fragments and sand-grain-sized nickel-iron droplets have been found in and around the crater.

The geologic record of cratering on Earth (and many other bodies in the solar system) attests to the impact of meteoroids much more massive than the one that produced Meteor Crater, including objects with kinetic energies equivalent to as much as one billion megatons of TNT. Fortunately, impacts of this magnitude now occur only once or twice every 100 million years, but they were much more common in the first 500 million years of solar system history. At that time, as planet formation was winding down, the asteroid-size planetesimals that were left over were being swept up by the new planets. The intensity of the bombardment during this period, often referred to as the late heavy bombardment, can be seen in the ancient, heavily cratered terrains of the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and many other bodies.

Some scientists have suggested that very large impacts may have played a major role in determining the origin of life on Earth and the course of biological evolution. The first signs of life are found in rocks that are only slightly younger than the end of the late heavy bombardment. Until the end of the bombardment, life could have started many times but would have been repeatedly wiped out by large impacts that boiled the oceans and melted the surface rocks. When life did finally establish a foothold, it may have done so in the deep oceans or deep in the Earth’s crust where it would have been protected from all but the largest impacts. Later, once impact rates had dropped dramatically and life was well-established, rare large impacts may have altered the course of evolution by causing simultaneous extinctions of many species. Perhaps the best-known of these associations is the mass extinction believed by many scientists to have been triggered by a huge impact some 65 million years ago, near the end of the Cretaceous Period. The most-cited victims of this impact were the dinosaurs, whose demise led to the replacement of reptiles by mammals as the dominant land animals and eventually to the rise of the human species. The object responsible for this destruction is estimated to have been about 10 km across, and it produced a crater roughly 150 km in diameter that is thought to be buried under sediments off the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. For an assessment of the likelihood and the effects of the collision of objects from space with Earth, see Earth impact hazard.

Measurement of meteoroid orbits

Even though the likely sources of most meteoroids entering Earth’s atmosphere are known, the most direct way to determine the number and types of meteoroids coming from each of these sources is by measuring their orbits. When two or more observers at well-separated locations document the same meteor in the sky and determine its coordinates, the direction in which the meteoroid was moving in space before it encountered Earth—i.e., its radiant— can be estimated reasonably well by triangulation. To determine the meteoroid’s orbit, however, also requires ascertaining its speed.

This latter requirement was satisfied in the 1940s with the introduction of wide-field astronomical cameras specially designed for studying meteors. Each camera was equipped with a rotating shutter that interrupted the light to the photographic plate at a known rate. The resulting breaks in the photographed meteor streak permitted calculation of the speed of a meteor along its path. The position of the meteor’s trajectory with respect to the stars photographed on the same plate also was measured accurately. Information from such observations made at two or more stations could then be combined to calculate precisely the orbit of the meteoroid before it encountered Earth. About the same time, special radar instruments also were applied to the study of meteors generally fainter than those observed photographically.

A very significant development in meteor science occurred about two decades later. This was the establishment of large-scale networks for photographing very bright meteors, or fireballs. These networks were designed to provide all-sky coverage of meteors over areas of about a million square kilometres of Earth’s surface. Three such networks were developed: the developed—the Prairie Network in the central United States, the MORP (Meteorite Observation and Recovery Project) network in the prairie provinces Prairie Provinces of Canada, and the European Network with stations in Germany and Czechoslovakia. The most complete set of published data is that of the Prairie Network, which was operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (later merged into the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) from 1964 to 1974.

An original goal of these Apart from measuring meteoroid orbits, one of the goals of the fireball networks was to recover a larger number of determine probable impact areas based on the observed meteor paths and recover any surviving meteorites for laboratory studies. Other objectives were to determine the orbits of the recovered meteorites and to compare the inferences of meteor This would enable a comparison of the inferences of theory regarding the density and mechanical strength of meteoroids with “ground truth” provided by the study of the same meteoroids meteorites in the laboratory. The networks compiled data that became the basis for a new outlook on meteor science and the sources of meteoroids, but the goal of recovering meteorites had only limited success. Three Only three meteorites were recovered, one by each of the networks. All three meteorites were ordinary chondrites, the most abundant type of stony meteorite.During the operation of the networks, many more meteorites were actually recovered by chance collisions with the roofs of houses.

In spite of this meagre recovery recordfor meteorite recovery, the networks compiled data that became the basis for a new outlook on meteor science and meteoroid sources. study of the recovered meteorites not only confirmed that they came from the asteroid belt but also led to an improved understanding of what happens to meteoroids when they enter and travel through the atmosphere. This enabled better estimates of the physical properties of meteoroids, allowing researchers to distinguish between meteors resulting from dense, meteorite-like objects and meteors resulting from less substantial objects that, for instance, might come from comets. Prior to this effort, there was a tendency to regard the study studies of meteors by astronomers and of meteorites by geochemists tended to be pursued as independent scientific fields that had little to contribute to each other.Meteors were studied by astronomers and were thought to be associated almost entirely with fragile and low-density “dust balls.” On the other hand, meteorites were dense rocks studied by geochemists in the laboratory as samples of the primordial solar system. Little thought was given to why meteor astronomers did not concern themselves with meteorites.

Straightforward application of conventional meteor physics to determine the density of the three recovered meteorites led to the incorrect conclusion that these dense rocks were also low-density objects. This clearly showed that there was something wrong with meteor physics as traditionally applied. A likely, but still not proven, explanation was that the value of luminous efficiency, conventionally used to relate the mass of a meteoroid to the brightness of a meteor, was too low. As a result, the mass of the meteoroid calculated from the luminosity of the meteor was too high. When this large “photometric” mass was combined to measure the cross-sectional area of the meteoroid (using the rate at which it was observed to slow down by atmospheric gas drag) and thereby its radius and volume, a spuriously low density was obtained.

The photographic data from the three fireballs recovered by the networks permitted a more direct empirical approach to the analysis of meteor data. It was found that the atmospheric trajectories of the recovered meteorites, including the end height at which they ceased to be luminous, could be accurately reproduced if the “dynamic mass,” determined by the deceleration of the meteor, were used in the theory instead of the photometric mass. It also was found that the ratio of the photometric mass to the dynamic mass was a constant. Laboratory measurements of cosmic-ray effects on the recovered meteorites led to a calculation of the “true mass,” which was intermediate between the photometric mass and the dynamic mass. Finally, the light curve (the plot of brightness versus altitude) was similar for the three meteorites.

These results, obtained from the recovered meteorites, could then be used to identify similar objects in the other fireball photographs. Their presence certainly could be expected, because meteorites are produced by fragmentation processes in space similar to those studied in the laboratory. Both experimental and theoretical studies of these processes demonstrate that for every large fragment there must be many small ones.

The recovered fireballs were among the very brightest observed by the photographic networks. Accordingly, there were among the fireball data many objects physically identical to the recovered meteorites. In short, the problem of determining which fireballs were meteorites no longer was dependent on uncertain first principle measurements of density. The empirical data obtained from the recovered meteorites could be used to check the record of each individual fireball, testing quantitatively whether or not the object “looked like a meteorite.”

To date, about 30 fireballs have been identified as stony meteorites in this way. The adoption of this approach has increased scientific knowledge of the distribution of meteorite orbits by an order of magnitude.

Application of the same method of analysis shows that fireballs from the Taurid shower, associated with Comet Encke, do not look like meteorites, or at least not like ordinary chondrites. On the other hand, they do not resemble dust balls either but appear to have significant physical strength. The stronger objects of this group have a strength comparable to that of ordinary dirt clods. These physical properties overlap with those of some carbonaceous meteorites. Further analysis of existing data can be expected to shed new light on important questions regarding the relationships between meteoroids of various kinds and their sources. If some way could be found to increase the rate at which fireball networks recover meteorites by about an order of magnitude, the empirical approach, proved valuable for identifying ordinary chondrite sources, could be extended to include less abundant types of meteorites.

Introductory information can be found in Harry Y. McSween, Jr., Meteorites and Their Parent Planets (1987); Robert T. Dodd, Thunderstones and Shooting Stars: The Meaning of Meteorites (1986); John G. Burke, Cosmic Debris: Meteorites in History (1986); Robert Hutchison, The Search for Our Beginning: An Enquiry, Based on Meteorite Research, into the Origin of Our Planet and of Life (1983); and John A. Wood, Meteorites and the Origin of Planets (1968). More advanced treatments are John T. Wasson, Meteorites: Their Record of Early Solar-System History (1985), and Meteorites: Classification and Properties (1974); V.A. Bronshten, Physics of Meteoric Phenomena (1983; originally published in Russian, 1981); and Robert T. Dodd, Meteorites: A Petrologic-Chemical Synthesis (1981). A descriptive and historical treatment of iron meteorites, including beautiful photographs, is Vagn F. Buchwald, Handbook of Iron Meteorites, Their Distribution, Composition, and Structure, 3 vol. (1975). H.H. Nininger, Out of the Sky: An Introduction to Meteorites (1952, reprinted 1959), provides firsthand experiences of fall phenomena on a nontechnical level. See also D.E. Brownlee, “Cosmic Dust: Collection and Research,” Annual Reviews of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 13:147–173 (1985). A catalog of known meteorites, including data regarding their fall, is A.L. Graham, A.W.R. Bevan, and R. Hutchison (eds.), Catalogue of Meteorites, 4th ed. rev. and enlarged (1985). There are two journals devoted to papers on meteorites and related bodies: Meteoritika (annual), published in Russia; and Meteoritics (quarterly). Many papers on meteorites are published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (monthly

Reservoirs of meteoroids in space

Most of the mass of the solar system resides in its larger bodies, the Sun and the planets. The planets move about the Sun in stable and well-separated orbits. It is almost certain that these orbits have undergone only minor changes since the formation of the solar system some 4.567 billion years ago. In addition, the planets are large enough to retain on their surfaces nearly all the debris excavated from craters produced by colliding bodies.

On the other hand, a smaller fraction of the mass of the solar system is in objects of such small size or in orbits so eccentric (elongated) that their physical survival or orbital stability has been in jeopardy throughout the history of the solar system. Most of these bodies are now found in either of two regions of the solar system—the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, which together extend from the orbit of Neptune out to distances typically more than 1,000 times as far. Small bodies would have been distributed throughout the early solar system, but most were rapidly swept up by the planets during a period that ended about four billion years ago. The flux of material from space that now falls on Earth (in the range of tens of thousands of tons per year) and other planets pales in comparison with this early intense bombardment. Since that time, large impacts have become relatively rare. Nevertheless, when they do occur, the results can be dramatic, as in the case of the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994 or the impact of an asteroid or comet thought to be responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs and other species at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago.

For an object to hit Earth, it must be in an orbit which crosses that of Earth. In the case of the rocky asteroids and their fragments, a limited number of processes can put these bodies into Earth-crossing orbits. Collisions can inject material directly into such orbits, but a more efficient process involves gravitational resonances between asteroidal material and planets, particularly Jupiter. Dust particles can also be moved into an Earth-crossing orbit from the asteroid belt through interactions with solar radiation. The above-mentioned processes are discussed in greater detail in the section Directing meteoroids to Earth. In the outermost solar system, icy objects in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, which are believed to be the source reservoirs of comets, are perturbed into orbits that ultimately become Earth-crossing through gravitational interactions with Neptune or even with passing stars and interstellar clouds. When such a frozen body travels inside Jupiter’s orbit and approaches the Sun, it gives off gas and sheds small particles, typically taking on the characteristic appearance of a comet. Some of these particles remain in the vicinity of the comet’s orbit and may collide with Earth if the orbit is an Earth-crossing one. This process is further discussed above in the section Meteor showers.

The asteroid belt and the outermost solar system, therefore, can be thought of as long-lived though somewhat leaky reservoirs of meteoroidal material. They are long-lived enough to retain a significant quantity of primordial solar system material for 4.567 billion years but leaky enough to permit the escape of the observed quantity of Earth-crossing material. This quantity of Earth-crossing material represents an approximate steady-state balance between the input from the storage regions and the loss by ejection from the solar system, by collision with Earth, the Moon, and other planets and their satellites, or by impacts between meteoroids.

In addition to cometary and asteroidal sources, a very minor but identifiable fraction of the meteoroidal population comes from the Moon and Mars. From studies of meteorites, scientists believe that pieces of the surfaces of these planets have been ejected into space by large impacts. They also know from the deep-space missions of the Galileo and Ulysses spacecraft that dust particles from outside the solar system are streaming through it as it orbits the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy. These interstellar grains are small and are traveling at high velocities (about 25 km per second) and thus have high kinetic energies, which must be dissipated as heat. Consequently, few are likely to survive atmospheric entry. Even if they do survive, they are rare and hard to discriminate among the much more abundant asteroidal and cometary dust.

Directing meteoroids to Earth

There is compelling evidence that nearly all meteoroids that reach the ground and can be studied as meteorites are derived from the asteroid belt. Ideally, scientists would like to know which asteroids are the sources of particular types of meteorites and the mechanisms by which meteorites are transported from the asteroid belt to Earth. The question of which meteorites came from which asteroids may not be comprehensively answered until asteroids are explored by spacecraft. (One exception, the HED meteorites and their relationship to the asteroid Vesta, is discussed in meteorite: Achondrites.) Nevertheless, there is considerable information about how they got to Earth.

Well over 300,000 asteroids have been identified orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, although there may be more than a million such objects greater than 1 km across and many more smaller ones. These bodies have orbital eccentricities and inclinations great enough that they collide with one another at velocities averaging about 5 km per second. Because of this, few asteroids larger than about 75 km in diameter have survived collisional destruction over the entire history of the solar system. The present-day smaller asteroids consist of debris formed by the fragmentation of larger asteroids that is caused by this natural grinding process. The grinding extends down through yet smaller meteoroidal bodies to fine dust.

The length of time that meteoroids spent in space as small meteoroids (a few metres across or less) can be estimated from the effect of their exposure to high-energy cosmic rays in the space environment (see meteorite: Cosmic-ray exposure ages of meteorites). For chondritic meteorites, there are significantly fewer older ones than younger ones. Most ordinary chondrites have exposure ages of less than 50 million years and most carbonaceous chondrites less than 20 million years. Achondrites, another stony type, have ages that cluster between 20 and 30 million years. Iron meteorites have a much broader range of exposure ages; some are between one and two billion years old. To some extent the ranges of exposure ages reflect the time it takes for meteoroid orbits to become Earth-crossing, but for the most part they are determined by collisional lifetimes, the characteristic time a meteoroid can exist before suffering a catastrophic collision. For most meteorite types, the time it takes for approximately half of a population to be eliminated by collisions is about 5–10 million years. The longer exposure ages of iron meteorites suggest that their greater strength allows them to survive longer in space.

Only two processes are known that can put meteoroidal fragments into Earth-crossing orbits on the short timescales indicated by their cosmic-ray exposure ages. These processes are direct collisional ejection from the asteroid belt and gravitational acceleration by dynamic resonances with the planets. As mentioned above, collisions at velocities of 5 km per second are relatively common in the asteroid belt. In such a collision, some material is ejected at the velocity needed to put it into an Earth-crossing orbit, but the quantity is small, and most of it is pulverized by the associated shock pressures. High-velocity ejection is the likely explanation for those meteorites determined to have come from Mars or the Moon, but it completely fails to provide the observed quantity of meteorites from the asteroid belt.

Resonance mechanisms are believed to be of much greater importance in sending material toward Earth. These resonances efficiently expel material from the belt, producing regions in which the asteroid population is depleted. Such regions are known as Kirkwood gaps after their discoverer, the 19th-century American astronomer Daniel Kirkwood (see asteroid: Distribution and Kirkwood gaps). One of the most prominent of these gaps lies at a distance of about 2.5 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. (One astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the Sun—about 150 million km [93 million miles].) An asteroidal fragment orbiting the Sun near 2.5 AU completes three revolutions in the time that Jupiter, the most massive planet in the solar system and a strong source of gravitational perturbations, executes one revolution. It is thus said to be in a 3:1 resonance with the planet. The regular nudges resulting from the resonance cause the orbit of the asteroidal fragment to become chaotic, and its perihelion (the point of its orbit nearest the Sun) becomes shifted inside Earth’s orbit over a period of about one million years. Numerical simulations on computers support the idea that the 3:1 resonance is one of the principal mechanisms that inject asteroidal material into ultimately Earth-crossing orbits.

If gravitational resonance with Jupiter is an efficient mechanism for removing material from the asteroid belt, one might expect the region close to a strong resonance to be cleared of material over the lifetime of the solar system so that by now nothing would be left to send into Earth-crossing orbits. A number of processes, however, cause asteroids to migrate within the asteroid belt, thereby maintaining a constant supply of material to the resonances.

Meteoroids less than a few hundred micrometres across—i.e., interplanetary dust particles—come to Earth from the asteroid belt via a rather different mechanism than the larger ones. Interaction with solar radiation causes them to spiral into Earth-crossing orbits from the asteroid belt through a process called Poynting-Robertson drag. The time it takes a particle to traverse the distance from the asteroid belt to Earth depends inversely on its radius and where in the asteroid belt it started out. For 10–50-μm dust particles, traverse time is calculated to be about 100,000 years. (Particles that are much smaller than a micrometre are actually blown out of the solar system by radiation pressure from the Sun.) Estimates of cosmic-ray exposure ages for micrometeoroids collected on Earth are broadly consistent with their traverse times calculated from the Poynting-Robertson drag process. In principle, some dust particles could be much younger than the calculated traverse times, either because they were produced in collisions of larger Earth-crossing objects or because they are not asteroidal in origin but rather have been shed by comets during comparatively recent passages through the inner solar system.

Edmond Murad and Iwan P. Williams (eds.), Meteors in the Earth’s Atmosphere: Meteoroids and Cosmic Dust and Their Interactions with the Earth’s Upper Atmosphere (2002), provides a comprehensive overview of the matter that falls to Earth from space. Peter Jenniskens, Meteor Showers and Their Parent Comets (2006), explains the origin of meteor streams and describes all known meteor showers, with particular attention given to the most important showers and their parent comets. Introductory information on meteorites and their relationship to meteoroids and asteroids can be found in Brigitte Zanda and Monica Rotaru (eds.), Meteorites: Their Impact on Science and History (2001; originally published in French, 1996); Alex Bevan and John de Laeter, Meteorites: A Journey Through Space and Time (2002); and Harry Y. McSween, Jr., Meteorites and Their Parent Planets, 2nd ed. (1999).